In December 2024, Rohan Mirchandani died suddenly at 42, at the peak of the business he had spent a decade building. Twenty months later, on August 25, 2026, his investors answered the question his death had left hanging over Epigamia. They bought more of it.

That day, roughly $20 million of Epigamia shares changed hands. It was not a fundraise; no new money reached the company. This was a secondary deal, where existing shareholders sell to other shareholders. What matters in a secondary is who chose to sell and who chose to buy more.

Who bought, and who sold

Two early backers used the deal to cash out. DSG Consumer Partners, one of Epigamia’s first institutional investors, sold down its stake. So did KA Enterprises, the family office of the actor Deepika Padukone. Both had held their shares for years, and each decided this was the moment to bank the return.

The buyers went the other way. Verlinvest, the Belgian consumer investor that first backed Epigamia with a roughly $6 million cheque in its 2016 Series A, increased its position. Sauce.vc joined the cap table for the first time. And Rohan Mirchandani’s own family bought more of the company he started.

“The strengthened commitment from Verlinvest, the Mirchandani family, and the new institutional commitment from Sauce is a strong endorsement of the business we have built and the opportunity ahead,” said Ritesh Gauba, who took over as CEO in May 2026.

The split is easy to read. The investors furthest from the founder decided their run was over, while the people who knew him best increased their stake in the company he built. Which leaves one question: what does the family see in Epigamia that a celebrity family office and an early fund were ready to sell? The best answer on record comes from Rohan himself, in one of the last long interviews he gave.

The category that didn’t exist

Rohan Mirchandani (1982-2024) grew up in New Jersey and took a degree from Wharton before coming home to India to build a fresh-food FMCG company. He co-founded the parent firm, Drums Food International, and launched Epigamia in June 2015 with Uday Thakker, Ganesh Krishnamurthy and Rahul Jain.

What he built was a market that did not exist. Greek yogurt had no Indian shelf to inherit and no domestic consumer already asking for it, so he created the demand himself. Revenue climbed from ₹87.8 crore in FY19 toward an ARR of ₹250 crore, and by December 2023 the brand carried a valuation of roughly ₹1,250 crore. Those numbers rested almost entirely on his conviction that Indians would pay a premium for a product they did not yet know they wanted.

He belonged to a generation of founders rebuilding Indian consumer from first principles. Shantanu Deshpande was building FMCG 2.0 at Bombay Shaving, Shankar Prasad was bootstrapping Plum into a ₹400 crore beauty brand, and Arman Sood was pioneering cold brew at Sleepy Owl. Epigamia carried the hardest version of that bet, because the others were at least entering categories that already existed. Rohan had to create his from scratch.

The pivot that made the company

Epigamia grew out of a failure. Its first product was not yogurt at all. It was ice cream, and at first it sold well. “We just thought we were kings of the world,” Rohan told the Founder Thesis podcast about that early run. “We literally thought we were unstoppable, we’d become invincible.” Then the monsoon arrived. Ice cream sales in India collapse for a third of the year, and the company could not build on a product that disappeared every wet season. So the team went looking for something Indians would eat in every month of the year, and settled on Greek yogurt.

His method for finding it was the real edge. New products went into a tight set of a couple hundred stores first, and the team judged them on whether strangers spent their own money before putting any capital into scaling. It let a small team test many ideas cheaply and commit hard to the few that worked. That discipline, turning a costly early failure into useful data, is the part of the company that never shows up on a cap table, and it is what the buyers are betting still runs through it.

The business that didn’t stall

The strongest evidence for his legacy is unglamorous: Epigamia kept performing after he was gone. Ritesh Gauba, a 24-year FMCG operator from Mars and Britannia, has driven the company toward profitability, with co-founder Ankur Goel elevated from COO and Uday Thakker still on the team. In FY24, operating revenue edged up 3.3% to ₹173.7 crore, while the net loss narrowed 74%, from ₹67 crore to ₹17.4 crore. The brand now sells Greek yogurt, artisanal curd, mishti doi, smoothies and snack packs through more than 25,000 retail touchpoints across 30-plus cities, and has raised over $60 million across its life from Verlinvest, Danone Manifesto Ventures and others.

A company that created its own category and has cut its losses sharply, now under an experienced operator, is the kind of asset early backers sell and long-term believers buy. What stands out here is that one of the believers is the founder’s own family.

Relive the Epigamia Journey with Rohan

Rohan rarely sat for long interviews, and now there will be no more. The conversation he recorded with us covers the ice-cream failure and the decade-long bet on a category that did not exist, and it is one of the few complete records of how he thought. To understand why Verlinvest and his family are buying while the early money sells, the founder’s own account is the place to start.

Watch the full conversation: A Masterclass on Pivoting & Scaling in Indian FMCG, Rohan Mirchandani (Epigamia)

Read the full story of how he built it: An Oral History of Rohan Mirchandani

Sources

Inc42: Verlinvest, Mirchandani Family Raise Stakes In Epigamia In $20 Mn Secondary Deal
Inc42: Epigamia Cofounder Rohan Mirchandani Passes Away
Indian Retailer: Rohan Mirchandani Dies at 42, Leaving a Legacy in India’s FMCG Industry
Wikipedia: Rohan Mirchandani
Thanks for reading The Founder Thesis Podcast | Learn from disruptive founders ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Founder Thesis Podcast | Learn from disruptive founders

Rohan Mirchandani Built Epigamia to Outlast…